The archive · Consumer Apps · Product decision · 2018–2022
Sky Mavis bets gamers will own in-game assets; $3B peak, $625M Ronin hack, then recovery
Vietnamese studio Sky Mavis bet play-to-earn would go mainstream; Axie Infinity hit ~2.9M users before a record hack nearly killed it.
Sky Mavis
What the business is
Sky Mavis built Axie Infinity, a play-to-earn game where players breed and battle NFT creatures (Axies), plus the Ronin blockchain and Mavis Hub game ecosystem.
Starting capital：$7.5M seed and Series A, then $152M Series B led by a16z at ~$3B valuation (October 2021)
How it started
Co-founders Trung Nguyen and Aleksander Larsen launched Axie Infinity in 2018, betting that the coming wave of blockchain games needed a real economy — scarce, player-owned creatures — rather than a game with tokens bolted on.
What happened
Axie exploded during the 2021 NFT boom: a $152M Series B led by a16z at a ~$3B valuation in October 2021, and 2.9 million users by March 2022. On March 23, 2022, an attacker stole five of nine Ronin validator keys and drained ~$625M from the bridge — the largest DeFi hack to date, discovered six days later.
How it ended up
Sky Mavis raised a $150M round led by Binance to reimburse users, hardened Ronin's validator set from 5 to 21, and kept operating; it later pivoted Ronin into a multi-game blockchain and remains a major Web3 gaming company.
Background
Sky Mavis, founded in Ho Chi Minh City in 2018 by Trung Nguyen and Aleksander Larsen, bet that blockchain gaming could reach ordinary players if the economy was real: Axie Infinity's NFT creatures were scarce, tradeable, and owned by players, with earnings flowing through a low-cost sidechain called Ronin.
The bet worked spectacularly in 2021. Axie's play-to-earn loop — breed, battle, earn — drew a reported 2.9 million users, overshooting the team's own 250,000-user target by roughly ten times, and Sky Mavis raised a $152M Series B from a16z at about a $3B valuation.
In March 2022 the company discovered that attackers had compromised five of nine Ronin validator keys and stolen about $625M from the bridge, the largest DeFi hack at the time. Sky Mavis raised $150M led by Binance to reimburse users, expanded validators from 5 to 21, and reopened the bridge after audits.
The company survived the hack and the broader crypto downturn, later repositioning Ronin as a general-purpose game blockchain. It is still operating and expanding, but the episode showed how dependent a play-to-earn company is on token prices, security, and user trust at the same time.
What has to be true
- The 2021 boom proved the core bet: ordinary users would play a crypto game if earning was genuinely possible and fees stayed low.
- The $625M hack showed that a few compromised validator keys could unwind years of trust in hours.
- Raising $150M to refund users, led by Binance, converted a catastrophic event into a survival story instead of a shutdown.
- Axie's revenue spike — $1.3B in the 12 months to February 2022 — was tied to token prices, a fragile base for a games company.
What can be applied
A business that grows on speculation inherits its volatility: when the token economy cools or a trust event hits, the product must stand on its own or the whole company falls with the market.
Aftermath
As of September 2026, Sky Mavis continues to run Ronin and Axie-related products, with Ronin hosting third-party games and the company pushing into new Web3 titles. It did not shut down after the hack, unlike many 2022-era crypto casualties, but it never returned to the user numbers of its 2021 peak.
Sources
- Axie Infinity's Ronin network suffers ≈$625M exploit in largest DeFi hack to date
- Axie Infinity creator raises $150M to compensate hack victims
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